Baybáyin Script is the Native Writing System in the Philippines (a.k.a. Alibata), this web blog is a part of Nordenx's Anak Bathala Project.
This is the Baybayin Modern Font Foundry - the source for development info, education, updates, downloads, typographic standardization, and online tools. (www.baybayinfonts.com)

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

"Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture" (FPAC) www.filamarts.org - is the largest presenter of Philippine arts and culture in Southern
California presenting over 1200 artists in 9 disciplines and attracting
audiences of over 25,000 people from all over the country.

FPAC 2012 @ San Pedro, California.

When FPAC's Pacific Artists Network (PAN) opened up an opportunity for Baybayin Script artist-activists like Kristian Kabuay (baybayin.com), Ray Haguisan (malayadesigns.net), and myself ("Nordenx" baybayinfonts.com), for us to reach and teach more people in Southern California about our advocacy to preserve & propagate our ancient script, we took it.

Since then, we have been in attendance at FPAC every year.

On a side note, I met Kris back in 2010 in San Francisco at a babaylan conference (babaylan.net) and Ray back in 2011 in San Francisco's Pistahan (pistahan.net) event. We've been together at various Filipino festival venues to promote our ancient script ever since.

FPAC 2014 weekend Post-eventum Report:

Baybayin Artists @ the 2014 FPAC

This year's FPAC weekend-long event at Grand Park, Los
Angeles, had one of the most active Baybayin practitioners in
attendance; particularly at the PAN pavilion
tent.

Despite the 100+ ℉ heat & humidity and the initial
hassles of setting up, the rest of the weekend turned out to be very
productive and positive. Foot traffic improved in the afternoons. We all
had reasonable sales of our Baybayin themed art materials, but that is
inconsequential to the amount of people who stopped by to listen &
learn about our ancient script.

I am delighted that many young
L.A. Fil-Ams are becoming well-versed in our script. I am also pleased
that they now know to avoid Alibata and the failures of Google search
results. And I am proud that they also believe in the purity &
sanctity of tradition; that "modern" doesn't have to be convoluted by
the western alphabet's orthography; and that they recognize the
difference between stylizing, functionality, and standardization. I lost
count of how many people complimented my modern baybayin typography
chart and the multitude of cellphone photos of it being taken.

FPAC 2014 PAN Pavilion @ Los Angeles, CA.

Kristian Kabuay's art & books are popular as usual, especially among the fan-girls. He did a live baybayin art on-stage and at the pavilion.

Malaya Designs'
pendants are hot as usual (he sold the most as usual). Hearing him
explain the background story to his work always brings in a crowd.

We were glad to finally meet and bring to our fold Robert J Sison and his fresh baybayin materials (love the temporary baybayin tattoos!).

Always a fan of Ka Faustino Caigoy, I can't believe he was just giving away his baybayin typography prints. But he's just such a nice guy.

Eliseo Art A. Silva was in attendance, his murals speak for themselves, but he did a live art painting with baybayin too.

Baybayin on youtube sensation, David Lazaro performed spoken-word poetry on-stage.

I sold a few of my remaining Anak Bathala copies of the first Komiks, art prints, and quite a bit of buttons. The
best part is talking to folks whose curiosities were piqued by my
typography poster. ->

Lauren Benetua's
team set up a table for the People of Coloring project where kids of
all ages sat down and colored-in the line arts that several of the
baybayin artists listed above contributed.

I saw a couple of
message boards and signages from the Youth Groups with baybayin written
on them. Correct & proper baybayin too.

All in all, this was a successful venue in my humble opinion. We can't
get to every visitor but collectively we reached hundreds of people and
got confirmation that they are learning from what we teach; also
confirming what we do matters to many.

Thursday, October 02, 2014

I have been meaning to upload the updated Mangyan fonts with the new RA character. So here it is: DOWNLOAD (.zip file containing 3 .ttf files)

Last year the Mangyan people's leaders opted to reintroduce the older Hanunuo RA letter-form based on the LA character (with a minor modification on the rightmost up & down end strokes). They retired Antoon Postma's dash — RA that was based on the Buhid variant of Surat Mangyan. New publications from the Mangyan Heritage Center (MHC) www.mangyan.org started to include the updated character earlier this year, starting with the Surat Mangyan Primer.
I'll update the individual .zip files in each of the font's DeviantArt download hosting later since I still need to update the keyboarding charts for them.

The Postma dash — RA and its vowel modifiers (kudlit) are still included in the fonts. Accessed by typing the Uppercase R, 7, and 8 keys. The new RA and its kudlit are now currently set to the lowercase r, (, and ) keys.

A custom keyboard layout for Mangyan script is in the works for Windows 8 and Mac OSX. I just need to optimize the Hanunuo Unicode font and finish up a Buhid font/typeface that will share some of its Unicode range with Hanunuo for similar kudlit positions. The keyboard layout will probably be ready before the end of this year.

I'm also working on a Surat Mangyan children's coloring book for the MHC.

Baybayin Pages

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